This year's LeWeb was bigger than ever. The conference lived up to its reputation of the largest European tech event by gathering entrepreneurs, startups, investors, VCs, journalists and bloggers from more than 60 countries around the world.

This year’s theme ‘SoLoMo’ (short of Social, Local and Mobile) has been chosen to feature the most interesting tech trend of the year 2011.

It was hard to choose between speeches and networking, as there were lots of great and inspiring speakers not to miss! Starting from Karl Lagerfeld who opened the conference by showing how he uses Internet and gadgets in his creative process.

For us personally, apart from our favourites, such as Dennis Crowley, Kevin Rose or Alexander Ljung, we were absolutely captivated by the Q&A session with the visionary Evernote’s founder and CEO Phil Libin.

Another integral part of LeWeb - the Startup Competition was co-organized with TechCrunch Europe this year. The top 3 finalists selected among more than 600 submitted applications came to pitch their projects in front of thousands of spectators.

The first prize went to a gamification startup Beintoo. A social-polling platform HeyCrowd had the second place, and the third place went to Babelverse, an application for real-time interpretation in different languages.

As for Mapize, we had the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people including the users of our tripsQ who gave us their smart feedback, which can considerably help us improve the project! We also organized a meetup with a very cool @dens and met the great foursquare community in Paris.

For this project, we teamed up with Google and APCE (French agency for entrepreneurship) to add to the platform a geolocated directory of organizations and institutions providing support to entrepreneurs.

Our own FX Cardi attended the project launch event held last Wednesday at Startup Café. And, of course, we are glad to make our humble contribution to such a useful project that aims to guide companies and entrepreneurs on various topics.

If you are as passionate about Foursquare as we are, I’m sure you will be interested to know that last Saturday we met up with none other than Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley himself.
It was a great and quite spontaneous event pulled together in just a few days.

Once we knew Dennis was in Cannes to speak at the Cannes Lions Festival we contacted Foursquare and proposed to organize a meetup with the local 4sq community.

And to our surprise, despite his crazy schedule, Dennis accepted to meet us!

Of course, the main theme of the event was Foursquare’s incredible new milestone. For those unaware, last week Foursquare surpassed the 10 million user mark (see a “sweet visualization” on the above photo).

The meetup was held in a beach party format and everybody could exchange a few words with “the coolest CEO ever” and his girlfriend Chelsa.

Dennis answered people’s questions about a $50 million fundraising (the latest news announced just the day before the meetup), Foursquare’s plans for the future and lots of other curious things…

For instance, we learned that Dennis had made his first checkin in 2004 via his then geolocation service Dodgeball.

Thanks once again to all those who helped organize this awesome event and who came to say hi.
We hope this kind of meetups will become a good tradition and will help evangelize Foursquare in France!

As I mentioned last week, we participated in the Open Data Challenge. And last Friday, after some weeks of suspense, the winning projects were finally published!

Unfortunately, we did not win any price this time but we discovered a lot of powerful and really useful apps leveraging open government data.

Here are some of the first price winners:

The first price idea was to create a mobile application facilitating citizens' participation in urban planning decisions (learn more).

The first price for the app went to a Slovak application uncovering influential people standing behind companies successful in securing contracts with the state. It’s a very nicely designed and easy to use tool, which could help route out corruption and illegal influence in any country: http://znasichdani.sk/l?l=en

The first price visualization was the Bike Share Map showing the current state of bike share networks in over 30 cities around the world: http://bikes.oobrien.com/

And one of our favorites was the 3rd price visualization from Netherlands showing word clouds of Dutch politicians' key words: http://www.politiekinzicht.com/. Funny and well visualized idea!

To find out about other winners go to the Open Data Challenge home page.

tripsQ is our first data visualization application that aims to help people make full use of the data they’ve generated while travelling, by turning their check-ins in the airports into various travel statistics.

Everyone who uses Foursquare can easily sign in to tripsQ and visualize his trips and travel itineraries.

The Beta version of tripsQ also provides users with detailed statistics on the distance they’ve travelled, the amount of CO² they’ve produced during each trip and other information about their travels.

The goal of tripsQ is to save your travel history as well as to make you use previously unused data hidden in your cell phones and data bases.

There are some new cool features coming soon:

The first one will help socialize your travel by showing the tips left by your friends in each of the cities you visit.

Another one will aggregate various connected data: amount of weight you’ve lost/put on (WiThings), number of steps you’ve taken (Fitbit), the distance you’ve walked during each trip.

So, if you like Foursquare, data & dataviz, sign up for tripsQ and visualize your trips!

We just finished working on our new dataviz for our friends from bluenove, leader in Open Innovation services in France.

This infographic was created based on the results of a recent survey on the subject of “Open Innovation” carried out by bluenove in over 60 big companies in France.

The dataviz sheds light on HOW French companies apply the open Innovation strategy, WHAT are the risks, barriers and advantages related to open innovation. It also shows the gap between France and the USA in the field of OI. For example, in 2011 41,2% of French big companies are at an early stage of implementing OI strategies vs. 49% of American companies in 2009!

On the whole, we can see that even though most respondents acknowledge the risks associated with open innovation (intellectual property-related risks etc.), they are still confident that the OI strategy can be worthwhile for their companies.

Here we are again! Last Saturday we submitted our new dataviz application to the Open Data Challenge: Europe’s biggest ever public data competition challenging designers, developers, journalists, researchers and the general public to come up with something useful, valuable or interesting using open public data.

Our entry, the Transparent School application, aims to map higher education institutions in Paris and its region and present in a visual way various statistics about these institutions.

As a bonus feature, we added to the map Foursquare tips and special offers from local businesses around the geolocated institutions.

- Map of all higher education institutions in the Paris region, which enables content filtering by type, supervisory ministry or administrative status and displays Foursquare tips and special offers around each of the institutions

- Dashboard which gives a breakdown of institutions by district (graph), by status and by type (pie charts)

- Charts visualizing some statistics from the Real Estate Directory for Higher Education Institutions, including the largest site owner, top 6 site owners etc.

The app was created based on the “Real Estate Directory for Higher Education Institutions” dataset taken from the PARISDATA website and the Foursquare API.

This application can be useful for those who want to know more about the higher education ecosystem in the Paris region.

It also can help students find interesting places to visit around their institutions (Foursquare tips & specials).

Last Thursday we were at Google France in Paris to meet Mano Marks (Google Senior Developer Advocate) and two other representatives from Google’s Swiss and UK headquarters to talk about geoweb, open data & dataviz challenges.

Within the framework of Google Geo Road Show in Europe Mano visited Paris to meet French geo community, with geo services & big data visualization at the top of his agenda.

And we were very honoured to be invited to meet Mano and his European colleagues at Google France.

We discussed our open data projects, Google’s new geo features and services (it seems that Fusion Tables is a pretty awesome tool that can help us resolve some of our technical problems) and the big data issues.

It was a great and very useful discussion and we got added evidence that there were lots of things to do in this area. We hope to integrate some of the new geo features in Mapize in the months to come.

As some of you may already know, April 16th is Foursquare Day. To encourage their fans around the world to get together and celebrate this event Foursquare has created a special badge and logo for this 4sqday. So we can unlock a 4sqday new badge by checking in on April 16th!

Some cities (unfortunately, not Paris) even officially proclaimed April 16th, 2011 as Foursquare Day. But anyway, we were happy to see that Paris was the first European city to get over 50 people signed up for the 4sqday meetup event.

At Mapize, we are big fans of 4sq, so we participate in organizing this local 4sqday event in Paris.
There are currently 70 "Count Me Ins" for the meetup, and all those who are in Paris on 4/16 are welcome to join us!

However, this year we tried not to confine ourselves to mapping the billionaires, but create a sort of dashboard visualizing some statistics on the world’s richest people in 2010-2011.

So, we looked at the 2010 and 2011 lists and visualized some interesting facts about the world's billionaires and their fortunes. For instance, our ForbesBoard shows:

- The total number of billionaires in the world
- Their combined and average net worth
- The top 3 billionaires in the world
- The average age and different age groups of billionaires (interactive graph)
- The types of their fortunes (interactive pie chart)
- The top 3 countries with the highest number of billionaires
- The top 3 companies with the highest number of billionaires

You can also compare data for 2010 and 2011.
And of course, just like the last two years, we mapped the billionaires according to their geographical location (with some personal data in the information windows). However, this time the map comes with a list view, where you can find the catalog including detailed information about the billionaires.

Just take a look at our ForbesBoard to find out more about the world’s billionaires.